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The risk of adapting a much-loved work is evident in the movie's muted reception from journalists in Cannes, and the mixed reviews it has received in the United States, where it opened last week. But it is a box-office hit, and cast and director all expressed pride in being faithful to the spirit of Fitzgerald's 1925 novel
-- despite the anachronistic soundtrack that features Jay-Z putting a hip-hop spin on Jazz Age sounds. "Leonardo used to drive me crazy -- but in a good way -- because he would say,
'are we honoring that book?'" Luhrmann said. "And that was our singular focus." Luhrmann is a Cannes darling -- his first feature, "Strictly Ballroom," played here in 1992 and "Moulin Rouge" opened the festival a decade later. He said he was delighted to bring "Gatsby" to the French Riviera, where Fitzgerald and his wife and Zelda lived "a youthquake" of glamor and decadence much like the one the writer captured in his novel. "He wrote it 20 miles up the road here," Luhrmann said, "while his wife was having an affair on the beach just down there ... and there was a French airman buzzing their house, who she was having the affair with. "The thing I think about that is, how much of that pain and beauty went into the writing."
[Associated
Press;
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